From tapping into the viral trends in TikTok to doing research to find the best channels that fit your business, here are 14 answers to the question, “Can you share your most effective tips on how businesses can leverage social media to increase brand awareness and engagement?”
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- Offer a TikTok Challenge
- Provide Customer Support on Social Media
- Create a Strong Brand Voice
- Collaborate With Influencers
- Embrace Social Listening
- Build Founder’s Brand
- Follow a Social Media Calendar
- Boost Engagement With User-generated Content (UGC)
- Use High-quality, Engaging Visuals
- Draw on Trending Topics to Build Awareness
- Try Video Content
- Maintain a Balance Between Informative and Promotional Material
- Produce Audience-focused, Interactive Content
- Match the Right Channels to Your Business Strategy
Offer a TikTok Challenge
Brands can easily grow their recognition using social media with no advertising budget. TikTok is the best place to grow brand awareness. Marketers flocked to TikTok after the Duolingo language learning app started appearing on TikTok.
Here is how it works. Brands offer TikTok users a challenge that involves using the brand’s product. TikTok users film themselves completing the challenge. People then post a TikTok Duet showing themselves completing the challenge next to others completing the same challenge. TikTok Challenges are lots of fun and result in a spike in engagement and brand awareness.
Janice Wald, Blogger, Mostly Blogging
Provide Customer Support on Social Media
I believe providing customer service via social media is getting more popular. Customers appreciate the ease, speed, and availability of social media channels for communicating with their favorite brands.
Businesses can use social media to give customer help, answer questions, and handle consumer complaints. This can help firms in developing trust with their target audience and increase customer loyalty.
Gerrid Smith, Chief Marketing Officer, Joy Organics
Create a Strong Brand Voice
To increase brand awareness through social media, it’s crucial to establish a consistent brand voice and aesthetic across all social media platforms. In doing so, businesses can establish a strong and recognizable online presence.
This helps to keep their brand top-of-mind for consumers while also making it easy for them to engage with the brand through their social media audiences.
Jonathan Zacharias, Founder, GR0
Collaborate With Influencers
Brands should collaborate with influencers or micro-influencers who align with their brand values and share a target audience. Influencer marketing strategies help businesses reach a wider audience, increase credibility, and build trust with potential customers.
By partnering with influencers, companies can tap into their established communities and leverage their authenticity and expertise to promote their products or services. Ensuring that the influencer’s content is aligned with your brand’s mission and messaging, however, is vital to maintain authenticity and credibility.
Michael Green, Co-founder, Winona
Embrace Social Listening
Embracing social listening is one of the best practices to maximize brand awareness and customer engagement. Social listening is just that, noting social media when customers unanimously agree on something about your brand.
When a brand truly listens to its fanbase, customers notice. Everyone appreciates being heard, especially when it is about something they are passionate about, like when a food company brings back a fan-favorite flavor.
Monte Deere, CEO, Kizik
Build Founder’s Brand
Social media can drive business growth by leveraging the power of authenticity. One effective strategy here is to establish a founder’s brand, which involves promoting the CEO as the face of the business on social platforms.
This approach can help humanize the brand, enhance approachability, and create a sense of authenticity—all of which are essential for building credibility in the market and generating relevant leads.
Chirayu Akotiya, Global Head of Marketing, Leena AI
Follow a Social Media Calendar
I believe that having a social media calendar may help organizations stay organized and consistent with their content strategy. A social media schedule specifies what information they will share on which platforms, when, and on which days. Businesses may improve the quality, reach, and consistency of their social media content by planning.
Matt Magnante, Director of Content and SEO, Fitness Volt
Boost Engagement With User-generated Content (UGC)
Leverage user-generated content (UGC) to increase brand awareness and engagement on social media. Encourage customers to share their experiences using branded hashtags, and feature their content on your channels. This fosters a sense of community and validates your products or services through social proof.
Jaya Iyer, Marketing Assistant, Teranga Digital Marketing
Use High-quality, Engaging Visuals
One effective strategy for creating engaging social media content is to use visuals. Visual content such as images, videos, and infographics tend to perform better on social media than text-based content, as they are more eye-catching and memorable. Businesses should aim to use high-quality visuals that apply to their brand and target audience.
Another important tip for creating engaging social media content is to be authentic and human. People use social media to connect with other people, so businesses should aim to show their human side and make personal connections with their audience. This could mean sharing behind-the-scenes photos or videos, responding to customer comments and questions, or featuring employee spotlights.
Jason Moss, President and Co-founder, Moss Technologies
Draw on Trending Topics to Build Awareness
It is easy to become so focused on driving your message that you forget to engage in other issues, and this is why one of the best ways to leverage social media to build brand awareness is to draw on trending topics. Social media audiences are fickle, and this means that they surf dozens and even hundreds of topics every day that may not seem directly related to your industry.
However, by taking the time to research trending topics, seeing which ones draw your interest, evaluating how they can relate to your target audience, and including them in some segments of your posting strategy, you can be viewed as insightful and as a trusted source of information.
By including trending topics as a part of your social media marketing strategy, you can better engage your target audience and ensure that you are always relevant while driving brand awareness.
Alexandre Bocquet, Founder and CEO, Betterly
Try Video Content
For businesses looking to boost their brand awareness and engagement, video is definitely a strategy to consider.
It’s the best way for customers to connect with your business on a more personal level, as videos allow for authentic communication in ways that images and text alone can’t replicate. By using live video, you can create authentic connections with your followers, and offer them transparency into your work environment or unique insight into what makes your product or service stand out from competitors.
You can even ask for comments and get real-time interaction and feedback from your audience, which in turn fosters community building and user-generated content creation.
Jeannine Betts, Owner, Jeannines Advice
Maintain a Balance Between Informative and Promotional Material
Avoid having the desire to advertise and discuss your goods online at all times. To effectively use social media, businesses must produce material that consumers will find useful when it comes time to make a purchase.
Having clients come to you rather than the other way around is the best method to expand your business organically. You achieve this by developing a standing as a reliable authority in the field. You will see a sharp increase in your following by producing lessons, product reviews, and general industry thought leadership.
A further excellent way to develop your brand reputation and position yourself as an industry leader is to gather favorable reviews of your product or service.
Peter Zendzian, President, ZZ Servers
Produce Audience-focused, Interactive Content
Focus on creating valuable content that resonates with your audience. For example, you can share stories about how customers use or interact with your product in interesting ways.
Also, create interactive posts such as polls and quizzes to get more responses from followers. If we consider visuals, ensure the images are high-quality; this will make them more accessible for audiences to remember and associate with your brand—ultimately driving increased recognition among consumers.
Stewart Dunlop, Founder and Chief Strategist, LinkBuilder.io
Match the Right Channels to Your Business Strategy
Identifying the right social media channels is crucial for the success of your social media strategy. This is often overlooked because businesses may assume that they need to be present on all social media platforms to reach a wider audience. However, not all social media platforms are created equal, and some may not be the best fit for your brand or target audience.
For example, LinkedIn may be more suitable for B2B businesses, while Instagram may be more effective for B2C businesses with visually appealing products. It’s important to identify the social media channels where your target audience is most active and engage with them there.
This is relatively simple to do if you reverse engineer your competition; chances are that they have already figured this out. Do a competitor analysis of their social media activity and see where they are actively posting. This at least gives you a good place to start.
John Cammidge, PPC Consultant, JCammidge
